Understanding Steiner's Philosophy

[Federica]

I went ahead and posted the following comment. I have a feeling that it will be written off as irrelevant immediately, but let's see.

Thanks - great treatment of the necessity to also provide one's own understanding of the spiritual phenomena, and their physical reflections. I actually also commented before you (and already quoted the entire passage from "The occult significance of blood"). My comment:

Nice - I didn't see that at first, but it's good you gave this exogamy aspect a deeper treatment. I suppose the main obstacle in this domain, as usual, is the ego and its firmly held convictions. Once someone gets to the point of writing an entire article expressing those convictions, it will feel like quite a painful experience to re-evaluate them, as if someone is trying to tear the roots of the hair out of the scalp. Hopefully, though, the interest in the deeper truth will eventually take the upper hand.

Exactly. One has gone with that to a conference at Harvard, and has received reinforcement from all sides.
However, I believe one must feel a little burn inside, when the decision is made, as a researcher, to quote out of context in that way.

[AshvinP]

However, I believe one must feel a little burn inside, when the decision is made, as a researcher, to quote out of context in that way.

Here is Ashton's response to me and my response. As is probably apparent, I doubt it's going much further.


"Thanks for your engagement, Ashvin. Yes it’s true I only shared a snippet, I had 20 minutes to present. But I don’t think the larger context of his theorizing around exogamy and endogamy invalidates what I said about that particular quote. My point was that it represents a form of racial essentialist thinking, suggesting that blood could limit the cognitive capacities of individuals. I don’t think race as Steiner uses it is actually a coherent or legitimate concept; the science of genetics bears this out by showing there are no meaningfully homogenous groupings that could be called “races” because there is more genetic diversity among groups than between them. I do think it’s important to acknowledge differences between genetic lineages, but this does not equate to racial typologies and are constantly transforming. Also, I don’t think Steiner’s narrative of exogamy and endogamy holds up for historians; there has always been mixing. I think today people even exaggerate about how much mixing happens; people today still tend to be drawn to partners who look like them. The quote you drew from me was in reference to Steiner’s claims about white skin and the Christ impulse. I wasn’t grouping these quotes together to try and show Steiner had a consistent teaching about race. One of my major points was that he was inconsistent about it. I disagree with you that it’s incumbent upon critics who only claim to be drawing on healthy reason (such as myself) to provide an alternative spiritual scientific account of race. I don’t know if it’s even possible. I have serious doubts about the whole enterprise. I don’t think phenomena like skin color necessarily have a clear meaning in the bigger picture of cosmic evolution. I did provide an alternative way to bring Steiner’s work forward though—that being an emphasis on Christ in ethics and epistemology, but that doesn’t seem to have landed for you? Or perhaps it’s implicit in your thinking?"


"Thanks for the response, Ashton. I'd like to clarify something in your thesis. The occult significance of blood has been observed and discussed by, not only Steiner, but practically all other esoteric thinkers since probably the dawn of esoteric thinking. Are you suggesting that they were all possessed by essentialist thinking and, in fact, that blood has no occult significance?

What I am also still confused about is why you would attribute racial or biological essentialism to Steiner, especially in light of the quote I shared. I suppose you explain that Steiner was inconsistent, and that sometimes he expressed completely novel and penetrating insights into the limitations of genetic determinism, but other times, he succumbed to the racial prejudices of his age and decided to lazily imbue all of his spiritual observations with that same determinism. But that seems to me like a catch-all explanation that we can use for any claim that we are trying to impute to someone, even if they suggested exactly the opposite throughout their life's work. If you feel that is a fair way of proceeding, and that it's outside of the realm of possibilities that you are simply misunderstanding his quotes and his method of research and expression, then I suppose there's not much more I could usefully add to the topic.

I would only add that we don't need clairvoyance to trace how Steiner's observations took shape, but precisely healthy and unprejudiced reasoning. We need to apply the latter to the spiritual scientific *method* of research, not only its finished content. We don't need clairvoyance to get a refined feeling for what clairvoyance is and the sorts of inner experiences that it explores, and how those inner experiences may be expressed through a corresponding intellectual lattice, as I described with the comet example. When that is not even *attempted*, it seems to me that the reasoning must be quite prejudiced, trying to fit Steiner's observations into a preconceived narrative.

As for emphasizing Christ in ethics and epistemology, I think there is a big difference between doing that theoretically and doing it in practice, as exemplified by Steiner. The impulse of Christ is not only to order our thoughts and words in such a way that we can speak about "racial equality", but to actually bring that equality about through the evolutionary process."

[Federica]

Here is Ashton's response to me and my response. As is probably apparent, I doubt it's going much further.

Yes. Hopefully this will be valuable for others, if not for Ashton. You put it in clear and cogent terms. I refrained from speaking of preconceived narrative in my comments, but I'm glad you didn't, because that's what it is. For my part, I was equally stunned by: "I also don’t assume that he is absolutely correct or the final say on the super sensible makeup of the human being". Overall, from these exchanges it appears to me that at this point he's confused about spiritual science. He also implicitly conceives philosophy as an armchair job. Let's hope this will change going forward.

[Federica]

In response to my comment:


Hi Federica. The quote from me regarding my inference about Steiner’s concern about blood mixing was referencing what he said about French culture, not the quote from the lecture you cited. My point about the quote from the lecture on exogamy and endogamy was that it qualifies as a form of racial essentialism by limiting cognitive capacity to the blood. So there two distinct quotes here and two distinct inferences from me about them. I wasn’t presenting it as a coherent theory from Steiner, but sharing a list of moments from his corpus where he is inconsistent about his teaching that race and the generic are not constraining factors for the spirit. I don’t think all of Steiner’s statements are reconcilable. I think he contradicted himself as most humans do. I also don’t assume that he is absolutely correct or the final say on the super sensible makeup of the human being and so don’t think it’s incoherent of me to deny that environments wholly determine the blood of human groups.

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Thank you for replying, Ashton.

My comment applies just as well to the quote about France. Since the faculty meeting from which the quote is extracted contains no other words whatsoever about our topic (the meeting was about language teaching in Waldorf) one can hardly gather an interpretation from that laconic, incidental remark, and even less can one infer that there’s a notion that races should be kept separate. The text doesn’t support that, especially when one has another passage (the one discussed above from which the second quote comes) where Steiner does elaborate on his position, and from which it unambiguously emerges that he thinks humanity *needs* mingling of blood in order to advance “to a higher stage of development”, as he described it.

Also, there is no support in either of the quotes, for the idea that people are “limited by the character of their blood and cannot become civilized”. While we are all of course shaped to some extent by heredity, for Steiner, the blood is not a static element that is given at birth once and for all. That would be totally non reconcilable with his cosmology and world conception. Yes, as a human, Steiner made mistakes and spoke inconsistently at times, but inferring from that something like racial essentialism is just unwarranted.

Anyway, I believe I understand your position. Not your position on Steiner’s ideas on race, but on the supersensible makeup of the human being and the spiritual-scientific world view in general, which you prefer to remain fluid about, as a professional philosopher. Again, thanks for your reply.

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I think it’s obvious that one can infer the concern about blood mixing from the quote with the teachers and so it doesn’t matter if he spoke to the contrary elsewhere. Again, my point is to show inconsistencies and disrupt the totalizing worldview which keeps proponents from genuinely questioning Steiner’s veracity. You say Steiner was human and made mistakes, but your arguments seem to suggest the opposite view.

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One thing is to say that Steiner was concerned about blood mixing in what France was doing in Africa - which I agree he was, in the sense mentioned in my first comment - and another thing is to generalize and infer that "there is a notion that races should be kept separate" and that "people are limited by their blood". I don't think these latter conclusions can be inferred.

Besides, Steiner made various objective mistakes (an example is in Ashvin's comment, there are more) but here I don't think the quote about France is inconsistent with the longer elaboration in "The occult significance of blood". Rather, the former is a case, or example, out of the spectrum of possibilities illustrated in the latter.

Regarding Steiner's veracity, if by veracity you mean accurate rendering of the reflections of spiritual dynamics on the facts of the physical plane, any sensible proponent should agree that such veracity is not always present. But again, inferring racial essentialism seems to me a quite different endeavor.

[AshvinP]

MS also commented, to which I responded (drawing on one of Cleric's previous comments):

"Hi Ashwin,

It seems to me that the issues Ashton is pointing to have to do with specific instances where Steiner appears to speak out of malice or simply racial anxieties, eg, the well-known instance (GA 348) when he ridicules the award-winning novel by Rene Maran, "Batouala," which was critical of French colonialism in Africa, and warns that pregnant white women who read the novel risk having their babies become mulatto. Perhaps this particular passage is not as well-known as it should be, given that when the Anthroposophic Press first published these lectures in the US (1981), the translation omitted the entire paragraph in the original German edition without comment. I suspect that the American anthroposophists responsible for preparing this translation were embarrassed by Steiner's comments. Maybe you would say they should not have been because there is some deeper explanation for the tone and content of his claims? Perhaps there is some reason that he decries the presence of Negro novels in Basel but not the presence of French colonizers in Africa? I mention this because it seems to me that, while Steiner may offer interesting and important geographic/climatic and esoteric accounts of skin color and other demographic differences, he may also on occasion have spoken not out of compassion and clairvoyance but out of an attitude quite normal for European intellectuals of his time.

Steiner does often emphasize that in our time, individuality is more important than genus. But he also indicates in many places that what he calls the white race is far less weighed down by generic characteristics than what he calls the black and yellow races."

"Hi Matt,

I am confident there is a deeper explanation than "malice" or "racial anxieties", but I don't think it's the kind of 'explanation' people usually seek on these topics, i.e., some critique or apologetic based on discursive rational argumentation. I think the deeper explanations will always involve a more imaginative effort to probe the relevant inner dynamics from the most varied angles.

For example, we can leave aside the particular novel and speak more generally. Just as a random example, we could use Agatha Christie's criminal novels or Stephen King's horror works. They are clearly white-skinned. It's not about who made them but about what kind of *ideas and feelings* pass through the mother's aura as the fetus develops. We can symbolically picture this as the way tree rings imprint the conditions of every season. Some authors call this spiritual galvanoplasty. Everything that the mother experiences during pregnancy - especially in the early weeks - has a strong influence on the child's etheric body, which forms the embryo. These effects may not be so strong as to alter gene expression in very unusual ways, at least not yet, but they certainly leave their imprint on the child's thinking and feeling substance. Reading criminal or horror novels during pregnancy won't remain without consequences for the growing baby. Imagine what it would be like to experience the growth of prenatal consciousness in an environment of horrific figures, subhuman desires, and the like. The baby really lives in this astral and etheric atmosphere, breathes it, and it leaves its imprints for the coming life.

Now, before we come to the question of whether any of that may apply to what Steiner was speaking of, particularly with respect to Maran and her novel, we have to honestly ask ourselves - do we actually consider this a *serious possibility* which can be investigated through higher cognition? I think many people attributing Steiner's observations to "racial anxieties" or "biological essentialism" are not pausing to ask themselves such questions and imaginatively explore them from various angles, before publishing their views. All too often, I think people are actually reluctant about the very possibility that these things can be inwardly investigated, but attribute their reluctance in this domain to Steiner's prejudices in one form or another.

On the other hand, if we seriously delve into these inner dynamics and their potential implications, we may gain a much deeper appreciation for Steiner's observations, for what he was *doing* when making those observations, even if we determine that their explicit content was erroneous in some way. In this way, even Steiner's errors will become a source of a much deeper esoteric education. We will be able to trace the errors to the deeper dynamics rather than simply attributing them to some myopic cultural prejudices and assumptions, and then feeling satisfied we have figured out 'what's going on with Steiner', which I believe is certainly a flawed and unproductive approach."

[Federica]

MS also commented, to which I responded (drawing on one of Cleric's previous comments):

Thanks. I can't find the passage MS refers to. Do you know where it is?
Anyway, I think it's good that all this is coming out. It teaches us something about the soul form from which these propositions originate.

I'm only finding this paper:
https://e-learningwaldorf.de/wp-content ... iculum.pdf
Taking a look at the table of contents feels like a déjà vu.